


I am a cemetery loathed by the moon

by chirpsichore



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Cangel, Grief/Mourning, I don't even know about the Shanshu guys, Post-Angel & Faith (comics), Post-Series, guys its 2020 and im still not over Cordelia's death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:40:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26907505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chirpsichore/pseuds/chirpsichore
Summary: Angel goes into retirement.
Relationships: Angel & Cordelia Chase, Angel & Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Angel (BtVS)/Cordelia Chase
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16





	I am a cemetery loathed by the moon

**Author's Note:**

> This is another fic I wrote a while ago. Forgive its aimlessness and journeyman wandering.

Cordelia gets to grow old.  


* * *

A couple of years down the line, with Connor settled down and settled into his new job--Anne and Charles’s second in command at the East Hills teen center, his father couldn’t be prouder--Angel goes underground. Not literally, as Spike insists--“Optimally with a stake through your bleeding heart, you wanker”--but he gets away from people a bit. Everyone who needs him knows where to find him, he makes sure of that with visits to Willow and Giles, and Faith has him on speed dial. Which she doesn’t need, by the way. Heaven knows she’s always been able to find him before. Fred’s working with her for the time being, perfecting her algorithm for predicting portals. So far they’ve picked up interdimensional travellers in seven different locations, all in Idaho. Lindsey was one of those travellers. Long, weird story that he only got in sputters through the static of a faulty landline.  


Buffy--well, Buffy doesn’t need to know where he is. He could find her with his eyes gouged out.  


In a little town in the American heartland Angel chats up the neighbors, goes to the occasional late-night barbecue, and pretends to be any other yuppie fed up with big-city living. He tells them he works as the night bartender at the only bar in town, a fake Irish pub in the lobby of the bed-and-breakfast, and that’s why he keeps such odd hours. It’s true, but with every casual interaction he is acutely aware of the lie at the heart of his existence. There is a wolf among the cute, fluffy sheep in this quaint pasture of a town, and it is hungry. Luckily the butcher looks the other way when his most frequent client chugs a pint of the red stuff. Apparently Angel isn’t the first undead American to pass through town.  


Every evening he looks up at the stars-- _they’re singing, Angelus, they have the most delightful little voices, especially when they scream,_ Darla whispers to him like a mother in his memory--and shivers. Now even these little pinpricks of light sting. Full moons make his skin itch. His age is starting to catch up with him. He turns his head and considers the perfect symmetry of his neighbor’s yard. In all his years of wandering the eternal night as one of the damned, he never lived anywhere so provincial. Cordelia would take one look at these endless yards of picket fence and identical flowerbeds and declare every one of his neighbors a sheep. Then she’d sigh, and say, “I miss picket fences.” He chuckles at that before he heads into town for his shift.  


He writes a book. That wasn’t really the plan, with this whole vacation deal, but it happens when he’s not looking. At the bar when work is slow, which happens more often now that the university went under and the population started hemorrhaging, when sleep eludes him during the little hours of the day (or when his neighbor is mowing her lawn, the more likely of the two, if he’s being honest), he cracks open a worn leather-bound notebook that is probably older than anything in this town and jots down thoughts, daydreams, memories, funny things that happened to him that day or seventy years ago. They begin to coalesce into a single story that isn’t exactly true but definitely isn’t fiction.  


Somewhere a young woman doesn’t meet a tall, dark stranger at a terrible party. Somewhere she goes to college and gets away from her terrible folks in a healthy way, by working retail in the summers and getting a steady job right out of graduation, a job that has nothing to do with answering phones and slaying demons. Maybe she’s a lawyer. She’d be one hell of a prosecutor. Maybe she puts that nose for profit-margins and low overhead to the test and gets herself through business school by waitressing until she can legally claim the assets in the trust fund her parents didn’t bleed dry. He saw her SAT scores, didn’t he, and all those acceptance letters she still couldn’t bear to throw out, that one night she was shacked up at his place. She had the brains, and the work ethic. She would have made do.  


Somewhere a young woman goes into an animal shelter one day on a whim and comes out with a kitten. Somewhere she buys cat food and litter boxes and scratching posts instead of baby powder and bottles of formula and off-brand diapers. She speaks in lilting tones to a cat when she feels lonely. Somewhere she raises a kitten instead of another woman’s child.  


Somewhere a young woman spends her twenties studying and working and saving up and going out to bars with friends instead of fighting and dying and being dead and still staying dead.  


He breaks the pen and ink bursts onto the white pages, spilling down his arm. For years he has waited, keeping the faith, but it seems this death is permanent. This one is the death that sticks. Cordelia Chase doesn’t do reruns. He stands up and throws away the pen.  


The next evening he finds another one lurking in his sock drawer and he continues writing.  


He gets another tattoo just for the hell of it, on his forearm. A verse from _Les fleurs du mal,_ in the original French. ( _Gosh, broody boy, for a deadbeat you sure are pretentious._ ) The artist is kind of subpar, and it has a couple words of misspelled, but he likes it. The sensation of novelty pleases him, the way that first grey hair did when he was ten years of age and finally felt deserving of the nickname his ma had given him, “little man”. It marks the passage of time, on a body that does not age, in skin that does not scar.  


When he runs out of blank pages in that notebook, he starts writing in another one, newer but yellowing fast. (One of Wesley’s, he thinks, that got mixed up in Angel’s things when the three of them were operating out of Cordelia’s apartment. It still smells like him. This death too is permanent.)  


He built a mausoleum for her in L.A. with the useless money he earned from Wolfram & Hart. She wanted to be cremated, and she was, but he still paid for the mausoleum, empty as it would stand. After all, there are a lot of empty graves in southern California.  


Wesley had told him she wanted to be cremated. Apparently Wesley was the witness to her will, and executor of her estate. Even in death Cordelia confided in Wesley. They had kept so many things from him. (Cordelia was likewise the executor of Wesley’s estate, but in his will there were no specifications as to funeral arrangements--it seemed Wes expected to burst into dust upon expiration, and therefore had not accounted for the broken body he had left behind. So Cordelia’s mausoleum does not stand empty, after all.) Her middle name was Elise. She never told him, but he knew it almost as long as he’d known her. In Sunnydale Drusilla had insisted on memorizing the girl’s full name for some revenge spell--abandoned as quickly as the idea had popped into her head--so he obliged and stole her transcript from the high school’s archives. Ergo, _Elise_ and straight A’s.  


He and Wes would sometimes reminisce about those days in Sunnydale, and the early days in L.A, and the unfortunate haircuts they both had in the late seventies, on the rare occasions the two of them visited the hospital on the same day. Of course Angel kept the Angelus talk to a minimum, and Wesley always skittered away from too much mention of either of the slayers he had failed to protect. But it felt almost normal, just two men who had shared different parts of the same lifetime. For those rare moments he could pretend it was just the three of them, again, against L.A. and against the world. _Cordy,_ he had prayed at her bedside after Wes left, _don’t go where I can’t follow._ God didn’t want him, but apparently He had wanted her.  


The inscription above the mausoleum reads: _Farewell, dear friend._ Guess he should change that sometime, add an extra _s._  


He draws, still, on the cold pages of shrink-wrapped sketchbooks from the office-supply store. A far cry from parchment, but at least he doesn't have to slaughter a lamb to get it. His memory does not fail him, he is pleased to find, but he can never get her mouth quite right. Her smile looks so strange frozen on paper. In life it flickered like candlelight.  


He draws other people, too, other places, other skies. But they are always “other”. His art is now divided between Cordelia and not-Cordelia. _It’s my blue period,_ he thinks sardonically. She’d be alarmed if she ever saw his obsessive collection. _Yikes. Clingy much?_ He tries abstract experiments in color to distract from portraiture. He gets lost in the color the way he used to get lost in the thirst. He stays away from red.  


Somewhere, a young woman becomes a not-so-young woman, and she grows old. Maybe she has kids and a husband, maybe she doesn’t, but she was never the type to settle for less than the best. She doesn’t die alone in an empty hospital room. She lives. She lives until her heart gives out.  


Under the ghostly reflection of a midnight sun a vampire blots out the past and lets time slip through his fingers.

**Author's Note:**

> Events of this are mildly canon-compliant with Buffy Season 8 and Angel & Faith.  
> Drusilla's revenge spell is meant to be a nod to Buffy Season 2 "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered." She dropped it as soon as Xander's love spell broke.
> 
> Title is from _Les fleurs du mal,_ "Spleen (II)" by Charles Baudelaire.


End file.
